Tyrants of Gravity follows the people of Earth who have survived the first alien attack and are now preparing for future attacks, while trying to survive the aftermath of the first war. Is this story more about survival—or about what survives?

The first book in the series, Gravity of Sol-3, is more about what or who survives. The alien sentinels sought to prevent humans from acquiring black hole energy technology that could threaten the dominant galactic worlds. The aliens also tried to prevent the evolution of man’s telepathic communication, deploying eugenic attacks to exterminate neurodiverse members of the population. If the aliens could have blocked these two elements of human civilization — one technological, the other biological — then humankind would survive but stagnate.

The aliens, Tyrants of Gravity, return in the second book to eradicate the human threat now that Earth has obtained both capabilities. Humans use black hole energy to power spacecraft, and human telepathy establishes contact with alien life. The alien antagonists plan to strike our world with relativistic kinetic energy weapons—releasing more destructive energy than a million nuclear weapons. In Tyrants of Gravity, the stakes are the survival of the human race.

Your battle planning and tech feel tactile and grounded. What research or frameworks shaped that realism?

This aspect of the stories came easily to me, as I have a background in science and engineering and have designed military weapon guidance systems and commercial computing systems. I used my experience with those systems, the teams of developers, and with government and military organizations. I also ensured the story’s events obey the laws of physics as closely as possible: I have a spreadsheet titled, Physics, for each story, and this is just as important as my detailed outlines of story structure and character arcs. The realism introduces natural constraints and obstacles that the characters must overcome.

The alien forces are not just antagonists—they react, adapt, and escalate. How did you approach their psychology?

The aliens rely on machine intelligence, MI, to operate their spaceships and their society. I extrapolated beyond our current AI technology to imagine systems that threaten their organic creators. The alien life forms, the organics, still manage to exert diminishing influence over the alien MI. I gave the MI characteristics of human political organizations, along with many of the weaknesses and faults humans exhibit today. The aliens must grapple with MI and organic conflicts as they pursue the greater objective of suppressing and destroying the human threat. The alien organics and MIs are flawed characters.

As a sequel, this book expands both scale and theme. How do you see the larger arc unfolding?

The first two books of the series focus on Earth and the first contacts with alien antagonists. These books are close together in time and result in the breakout survival and advancement of the human race, making Earth’s inhabitants viable contenders in the galaxy. The worldbuilding of the first two books was a straightforward extrapolation of present-day Earth. Future books will explore how humans exploit their new capabilities to travel to the stars and interact with the alien species that first watched over and then assaulted Earth. Human neurodivergence and telepathy progress and dramatically affect the structure of society.

I have two works in progress that transit across space and time and feature significantly more worldbuilding for the alien settings, cultures, and technologies of Luyten-B and Proxima-B. Humans travel to the home world of the Luyten, Cap, to find the captain’s world subjugated by Centauri masters. Human military and diplomatic missions journey to the Centauri fleet station on Proxima-B to confront the alien civilizations from a position of strength, but grapple with the unintended consequences of their missile and cyberattacks on the Centauris.

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